ate Ue ee OSN eB tL be eal aN 13 
The Conservation Column 
By CHARLES W. KOSSACK 
Miami Host to Wildlife Conference: The 17th North American Wildlife 
Conference will be held in the Municipal Bay Front Auditorium at Miami, 
Florida, on March 17, 18 and 19, 1952. 
The Wilson Meeting: The 33rd annual meeting of the Wilson Orni- 
thological Club will be held at Gatlinburg, Tennessee, the entrance to the 
Great Smoky Mountains National Park, on April 25-26, 1952. 
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Pheasant Distribution and the Weather: The long-standing mystery of 
why pheasants do not establish themselves in the wild in southern climes 
while the smaller and less aggressive quail does very nicely may have been 
solved by the Illinois Natural History Survey Division. 
On the basis of experiments conducted to date, the answer may lie in the 
temperature of the eggs during the laying period. Pheasant eggs exposed 
to high temperatures showed a marked reduction in hatchability, while quail 
eggs subjected to the same conditions showed none. 
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The Importance of Winter Cover for Wildlife: Tests conducted by the 
Army to obtain information on the winter survival of troops unintentionally 
show the great value of winter cover to game birds. 
The research workers used pigeons in experiments to determine the 
mechanism that permits birds to cope with extreme cold and to find clues 
that might be applied to military problems. The same experiment demon- 
strates the extreme importance of adequate winter cover to game birds. In 
the test, pigeons were placed in sealed jars in cold chambers whose tempera- 
ture was maintained at 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. Many survived 
as long as six full days without food. It was found that the pigeons were 
able to mobilize foodstuffs stored in the body very efficiently even though the 
extreme cold required an energy expenditure up to four times the normal 
rate. In the presence of wind, resistance to cold decreased rapidly. 
This experiment demonstrates the great need of game birds for winter 
cover in the northern states. Well-dispersed cover to reduce wind may well 
mean the difference between death and survival of game birds in farming 
areas when a blizzard strikes. 
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Nest Predation Traced to Type of Cover: A theorem of wildlife manage- 
ment, that predation increases as the quality of cover declines, was borne 
out in a recent study of gull predation on duck nests at Farmington Bay 
Bird Refuge in Utah by Clyde Odin of the Utah State Agricultural College. 
Nest concealment proved an important point in the survival of nests. 
Gull predation was almost negligible in nests of good concealment, while 
destruction rose to 33.8 per cent of those poorly concealed. In all, 2997 eggs 
in 317 nests were examined, and the loss to gulls was 18.3 per cent. A series 
of dummy nests designed to resemble duck nests under natural conditions 
